Mailwasher Pro

Are you still receiving tons of Spam everyday? With a program, such as Mailwasher ( the free one) or Mailwasher Pro ( Demo here) installed, it automatically filters out Spam and shows you which emails are to be deleated before the rest of the emails go to your inbox. In otherwords, you are deleting them at the server level, instead of at your inbox . This program has a learning mode that allows you to "teach" it who are your friends, and those that aren't. Tonight, the makers of the program...Firetrust, sent out an informative newsletter that I thought was well worth passing along on how to make the program operate better for you, and also an option to add another feature called First Alert, which sends a report of your Spam and thus, with many current reports, it has one of the highset security measures against spam and all the problems that come with unwanted emails entering your computer. Mailwasher is free, and Mailwasher Pro which now comes with First Alert ,($37.00 US can be paid by PayPal), but it gives you peace of mind and only the emails you want, coming into your Inbox.

Read through the letter I recieved on how to better utilize Mailwasher and also a little update on Spam and Antivirus. Lots to digest,but worth your while to learn a little more about these two computing menaces.



FIRETRUST NEWSLETTER
Hi,
As you may have noticed, over the past couple of months spam has got a lot worse. So I thought it's probably a good time to send you some tips and ideas to get around the ever increasing flood of spam.
First of all, I'll cover how you can use MailWasher better to trap spam and then discuss some other steps you should take to reduce spam getting to you. Lastly I'll talk about how spam works and why we're still getting it.

Contents
Use filtering properly
Use how to use your learning filters - this really helps
Filter at the server first
Get rid of your catch-all account
Use an Anti-virus - this one is free
The current state of spam

1. Use filtering properly

Since Mailwasher works by filtering your email before it gets to your computer, you should take the time to make sure it's doing a good job of telling the difference between spam and your good email. We'll keep this simple.
Click on the 'Spam Tools' button on the front screen of Mailwasher.

Friends list:

People on your Friends List always get through and are clearly marked green. If you haven't taken the time to add your contacts to the Friends List, take 5 minutes and do it. It will make a big difference.

FirstAlert!:

This service is getting better and better all the time and it helps with training your filters to recognise spam. Turn it on.

Learning:

Training your filters to recognise spam and good email is really effective and ensures a high degree of accuracy. You don't need to do anything here as I'll come back to this in the next section.


Origin of spam:

This works by blocking spam based on its point of origin. Two very reliable, accurate and well-known services are ORDB and Spamhaus. Make sure you have these ticked as working. If you don't see them, click on 'Add' then
Name (for your benefit): ORDBDomain (to validate with): relays.ordb.org
Name (for your benefit): SpamhausDomain (to validate with): sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org
Click 'OK' each time to enter these.
These will help to catch a lot of spam.

Some points to note:

Did you know you can auto-delete most of the spam so you never see it in Mailwasher?
First of all, make sure you have all your contacts listed in your friends list - these must always get through. Then for FirstAlert! and Origin of Spam, select:
Perform the action:and select 'Automatically (without notification)'.

If you do accidentally lose good email with this, you can rescue any email in Tools>>Statistics>>Mail Log.

Another good idea is to hide your friends' emails from view. See Spam Tools>>My Friends list>>Action>>Hide the email. This has the effect of displaying only the spam in your email account. You can then quickly check, then process and download only your friends email to your email program.


How to use your learning filters - this really helps

No one else gets the same email as you, so you need to teach Mailwasher how to treat your email for you. It doesn't take much time and, once you know how to use it, it will make a huge difference to how well MailWasher recognises your spam.
On the left of your screen when using MailWasher you will see a 'Learning' column.
One day when you're checking your email with MailWasher, quickly spend a minute or two ticking either the 'Trash bin' icon for spam (marks with an X), or the 'envelope'(marks with a tick) for your good email.
It learns and adapts, and it will start to do the work for you - very quickly and accurately. So make sure you categorise your email whenever you check it. Every time you do, MailWasher's filters get more accurate.

Here's a demo you can watch to see how to do this.

http://www.firetrust.com/download/filters.htm You can skip the part 'How to set up' as Mailwasher comes with it turned on by default.

3. Filter at the server first

An effective way to filter through Mailwasher is to make sure your internet provider is filtering your email first (and doing a good job) - before it gets to you. Some providers are better than others at this, but as long as you're not losing your good email they should be filtering out 90-95% of the spam before it gets to you.
Some businesses will run their own email systems and to effectively do this, they need to filter out most of their employees' spam but, at the same time, make sure good email always gets through or is retrievable.

At Firetrust we have available a very popular free open-source anti-spam solution for businesses who run their own email server. If you're interested in the technical details, it plugs into Microsoft Exchange, Sendmail and Qmail or runs as a gateway. It runs on Windows, Linux or Solaris. Information and download here :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mailwasher/

4. Get rid of your catch-all account

We've had a number of people writing to us this last month saying they get around 2,000-3,000 emails a day. And you thought you had it bad!
Anyway, after speaking to these people it turns out, they own their own domain name, e.g. @company.com.
Now spammers have little regard to who they send their spam to, so they will try any address at the domain name you own.
So, instead of just getting email to their own named email address, they were getting email sent to anyone at the domain name they owned. Eg. If they had an email address bob@company.com they were also receiving email addressed to mary@company.com, simon@company.com, mark@company.com, house@company.com, car@company.com, boat@company.com, anything@company.com, xhfrngy@company.com ... (you get the picture) ...
Once we told them to call their internet provider and to change their email account from a 'catch-all' account to only getting email addressed to their email address, they experienced a huge reduction in spam.
This was only for people who get email to their own domain name, so don't annoy your internet provider if you don't have one.

5. Use an Anti-virus - this one is free

If you didn't know it already, the majority of spam is sent by people who have viruses on their computers. Not only do people not know they have a virus on their computer, they don't know they are sending spam.
This is how it happens. A person doesn't have antivirus installed and gets a virus. The virus is the type which turns the computer into a zombie, that is, the virus allows the spammer to control the computer and use it to send out spam.

Of course it is very difficult to track and stop spam from these computers as one spammer may control around 50,000 computers to send out their spam.

So, INSTALL ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE ON YOUR COMPUTER! And tell your friends to do too, and they can tell their friends etc.

If your current antivirus subscription has run out, then it's not working for you any more. Either pay for another year or download AVG antivirus which is completely free to use and works very well. Get it here - http://www.grisoft.com/doc/products-avg-anti-virus-free-edition/lng/us/tpl/t pl01

6. The current state of spam

A few years ago, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates predicted that spam would be eradiacated by 2006 but if anything, it's getting worse. As you've probably realised, fighting spam is a bit of an arms race. We block something, they get around it and so on....

The main problem of spam is that it's an economic problem. If it wasn't profitable to send spam, it would almost certainly stop.

So what can we all do to stop the flood of junk email?
The answer is simple :DON'T EVER EVER BUY ANYTHING ADVERTISED IN A SPAM EMAIL!

Of course you should never buy something featured in a spam email, no matter how good it looks. Even if you don't get defrauded out of your money, you're encouraging the spammer to keep sending his junk messages.
This latest spam outbreak is proving harder and harder to block. Either it uses lots of unrelated words together or is composed of an image, with random noise to avoid detection. We are busy working on solutions to better detect this type of spam and we'll be rolling out a new product in the near future.


Until then, make sure you follow the guidelines I've laid down for you.
Thank you to all of you who send us your comments and suggestions. We enjoy hearing from you - please keep in touch.

And feel free to forward this newsletter on to your friends and family.
Have a great day!Nick Bolton and the team at Firetrust

www.firetrust.com



"The Creator"